> Sorry. What I thought you said was that you had spent several hours
> on it and didn't want to spend more time on it. I've told you I
> don't want to work on it either.
>
> If there is no way to trigger this bug without using internals, then
> it has not been demonstrated to be a bug in R. It might be one, or
> it might be a bug in your code. Often I'll work on things that are
> demonstrated bugs, but I won't commit several hours to debugging your
> code.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>

I sympathize with not wanting to spend hours on other people's code-- and I appreciate that you have spent a lot of time off-list trying to help me with 'parse_Rd' recently.

But in this case:

(i) there were only 3 lines of code in the first example! If I've done something wrong in those 3 lines, it shouldn't take several hours to diagnose...

(ii) the real problem may well not be in 'parse_Rd' but in 'lazyLoad' etc, as the subject line says. Presumably you picked up the original thread because you're the 'parse_Rd' author. If you're sure it's not 'parse_Rd', or if you don't want to look at the code for other reasons, perhaps you could alert the author of the lazyloading routines (Luke Tierney?) to see if he's willing to look into it.

(iii) I deliberately haven't submitted a formal bug report, because my reproducible examples need to call 'makeLazyLoadDB'. (Though Henrik B is able to trigger the same problem without it.) As you say, by R's definition of a bug (which certainly isn't the same as mine) I cannot demonstrate this is a "bug". So the R-bug lens may not be the correct filter for you to apply here.

Further to the problem itself: Henrik Bengtsson's report seems symptomatic of the same thing. I've generally hit the bug (damn!) only on the second or subsequent time in a session that I've lazyloaded, which is one reason it's hard to make reproducible. If you want a reproducible example to help track the bug down, then my original 3-liner would be easier to work with. However, while that one does reliably trigger an error on my laptop with 2GB R-usable memory, it doesn't on my 4GB-usable desktop. For that machine, a reproducible sequence with the only internal function being 'makeLazyLoadDB' is: